Concepts to Deal with Stresses of War. Works of O’Brien and Gilbert

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Analyzing Concepts to Deal with Stresses of War using the Works of O’Brien and Gilbert
Vehicular accidents, sudden death of a love one, acquisition of incurable diseases, and other traumatic events incapacitate a person to deal with everyday life. Most of the time, the mind tries to cope to these stressors by using psychological first aid, especially, if the real world does grave irreversible harm. This is evident in the essays “How to tell a True War Story,” by Tim O’Brien and “Immune to reality,” by Daniel Gilberts, where both authors rationalized the variability of a person’s discernment of a given situation. In the essay of Tim O'Brien, "How to tell a True War Story," O'Brien presented the differences in the interpretation of truth, such as how different people perceive and reflect on same experiences. O'Brien presented his story as well as the stories of his comrades particularly Rat Kiley and Mitchell Sanders about their perceptions about the Vietnam war to deal with its difficulties. Additionally, O'Brien presented the conflict between the believable and unbelievable situations when it comes to war stories. In Daniel Gilberts, “Immune to reality,” he presented the science behind the people's psychological immune system to on how to deceive oneself to only let our mind focus on favorable facts and experiences rather than traumatic events. People are usually unaware about their psychological immune system as these mind deceptions are linked to a person's view changing the experience of bad events into a good one. Although the O'Brien's essay was based on the stories of his comrades, as well as his own, experiences to describe what war looks like in their from their experience, the essay of Gilbert with regards to a person's psychological immune system should be further studied since these explains the reason why O'Brien and his comrades had varying version of truths about coping with the stresses of their war experience. In this paper, the stories presented by O’Brien about dealing with stresses of people’s experiences particularly the perceptions of Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders and himself during the Vietnam War will be explained using the rationalization of Gilbert regarding the psychological immune system.
A person has a psychological immune system to protect a person against the painful feelings of loss and failure and generate something good from the experience (Gilbert, 131). In O’Brien’s essay, Rat Kiley's friend named Curt Lemon got killed by accidentally stepping on a land mine during one of their made-up games which involved catching a smoke grenade. After Lemon's death, Rat proceeded to write a heartfelt letter addressed to Lemon's sister about the heroism and greatness of his brother. According to O'Brien, "He gets all teary telling about the good times they had together, how her brother made the war seem almost fun, always raising hell and lighting up villes and bringing smoke to bear every which way (316)." In this quote, Rat focused on the positive side of Lemon by minimizing the other negative characteristics of the war when Rat is with Lemon. However, Lemon's sister ne...